London: Call me petulant, but I’m not sure Britain is getting credit for our fine work in Libya. The Islamic State, till recently present only in the semi-mythical lands of Syria and Iraq has now set up residence in the Libyan town of Sirte. Which is a hell of a lot closer to Italy than we are.
Also, Derna. That’s another town they’ve got. I’d never heard of Derna before, but apparently, Isis has held it since last October. Last week they took a group of six-year-olds to watch a beheading. Derna to Crete is less than Liverpool to Dublin. You could almost swim it.
A “key reason” for the Isis success in Libya, reported the Washington Post last week, “is the chaos that has enveloped this nation since the 2011 Arab Spring revolt”. Only — and I know it’s a little thing — but isn’t a “key reason” for that chaos the way we bombed everything? You can’t have forgotten. David Cameron’s lips got terribly thin, remember, and his eyes burned with the holy conviction that everything in Libya would get much better if we could find something to bomb. Or, better still, persuade America to bomb it. And then, when it didn’t get better at all, we just seem to have… wandered off. Whistling. As if the sheer, utter, hopeless collapse of a state, and the bombsweren’t connected at all.
Syria, of course, is supposed to be the counterfactual. “We left Syria alone,” say the hawks. “We wanted to bomb, and the likes of you wouldn’t let us! And look what happened! Isis all over the place!” Which is a strange argument because, well, it wasn’t Isis they were going to bomb, was it? It was the people Isis are fighting; the Army of the very, very horrible — although evidently less horrible — Bashar Assad. Which Isis might not have been altogether distraught about. True, we are still told, again and again, that removing Assad in a timely manner would have led to “the moderate Syrian opposition” taking control. This, though, like the whole basis for our endeavours in Libya, seems to have been a bit of a hopeful punt. That baseless familiar belief, that if you blow up something nasty, something nicer will arise.
Last year I interviewed Tony Blair for GQ. He’s tricky. Yet now and again, despite himself, he couldn’t help but be interesting. “Where I’ve changed,” he said at one point, “is with my view that if you can have evolutionary change, it is better than revolutionary change.”
With Iraq, of course, Blair clings to the view that evolution would have been impossible. I suppose he has to, because the alternative would be too many nights spent screaming into a pillow. Even so, this comes from a man who put regime change at the heart of our foreign policy. An instinctive, belief that, if you can make a nasty government go away, a Western-style democracy will follow.
Only a lunatic could still believe that after the Arab Spring, and despite what his detractors say, I don’t think Blair is one. His naivety in Iraq is his legacy; he’s the guy who tried to bomb things better, and actually bombed them far worse. The thing is, so is Cameron.
Look to the failed state of Libya, and there’s no other conclusion to which you can come. The strategy didn’t work. Things are not better, not for Libya, nor for us, either. And yet, nobody seems to care. Nobody blames him. Nobody ridicules his arrogance, for believing he could blow stuff up, and then sit back, waiting for the rubble to fall into line. Nobody asks whether Gaddafi could have been dealt with another way. It’s as though somebody else blew the place up, long, long ago. But it wasn’t somebody else. It was him. And it was just the other day.
By arrangement with the Spectator
